Recent reviews by Bumble

TLDR; hold off on this game.

Biggest gripe up front -

Chekov's gun. It's a literary principle by Anton Chekov. Basically if you're going to throw elements at the reader, they have the potential to become significant later. If a gun on the wall is highlighted, chances are you better pay attention because you might need that gun later on in the story. The game doesn't really do this well. It often drops you into situations that have no hints leading up. So you sit there scratching your head wondering what you did wrong as a player, but when you think about it no hints were ever given for you to pick up on. So you just feel like you're duped and conned, rather than rewarded when you figure out the answer. I didn't feel like I did a good job of following and was rewarded for doing so.

Pros:
* The world is beautiful and fairly huge.
* There's a good variation of tasks. I haven't really gotten too board so far. Seems to always be some new monster type around the corner to encounter and I'm a good ways into the game.
* The story is interesting. Definitely some good depth there.

Cons:
* Really low quality of life. It seems like the devs totally glossed over this. Some tasks are just frustrating for no reason. Not even the monster hunts. Things like "Oh, you have to jump over five railway cars just to sell items for barely any money?" At some point it isn't challenging, it's just frustrating and pointless.
* The game crashes. I play the game mostly on Geforce Now, which is on predictable and reproduceable hardware. It crashes every five minutes.
* After every crash, it takes another five minutes to rebuild shaders and load back into the game.

I'd wait till they fix at least the technical issues, but consider buying this game on sale only given the gameplay design. It's worth it, but definitely sub $30.

I almost didn't buy this game due to the review bomb from people who don't read the EULA. Luckily, I read into the negative reviews and saw they mostly had that in common, and decided to give it a try. I don't normally post reviews, but I think it's only fair to add a positive one to counteract the unfair negative reviews this game is getting.

The pros (only playing Multiplayer COOP so far):
* You can join matches in progress and have people join in progress on you, so you don't need to worry about people dropping out.
* The missions are fairly linear, but it works similar to L4D2 where the locations of items and when enemies attack can be somewhat random.
* The AI direct is brutal but balanced.
* I don't see anything with an advantage behind a paywall so far. All cosmetics only really.

The cons?
* The learning curve is higher than you'd think with team dynamics. It takes time to realize what skills to bring, and even normal difficulty is brutal without the right skills and synergies in coop.
* It's sometimes hard to find games at odd hours of the day.
* I've had the game freeze during joining games on occasion, and the loading screens are a pain.

Overall, it's a bit of a grind and it's a little repetitive. If it had to rate it, I'd give it something like a 70-75%. I'd like to see more content, but I don't feel my money was wasted either.

Update 03-15-2025:

Going to downgrade this to close to a 50%. Not because the game isn't amazing "when it works," but because it takes so long to find a queue with people playing the class you want that the time to find a game is nearly 30 minutes. I can't recommend the game in a state like this where my time is wasted.

The game is pretty repetitive, not that Ace Combat wasn't / isn't, but it doesn't do anything to mix things up for the most part. The balance is also horrible in missions and it seems more like an annoyance to play than genuinely fun and interesting. Really disappointed in the gameplay given all the glowing reviews. Just got boring and uninstalled it.

I really wanted to like this game, and would've stuck with it if it weren't for the bugs and core game breaking problems I'm seeing. Unfortunately whenever I loaded a save, it would leave my game in an in between state -- where I'd have items researched that I didn't have researched when the save was made. Also, the starmap breaks for me upon loading a save, and I'm unable to do any mining once I load a previous save.

Otherwise it seems like it has promise. While I refunded it for now since it's quite unplayable, I'd love to revisit it later since the aesthetic is quite nice.

I'd love to check this game out down the road, but it seems like it needs another year or two before it's really an early access game in the true sense of the word.

So, I'm not sure what technical issues this game had at launch to get it downvoted this much, but I'll give my perspective the game as it stands now.

In my opinion, the gameplay doesn't spend enough time really properly building up characters to make me care enough about the story. I'm into the whole "red dawn" like setting of the game itself, but I really wanted more gameplay revolving around the story than I did an open world game.

Overall, I didn't feel like anything about the singleplayer experience was anything but basic in execution. It just felt like a very generic, semi-open world shooter.

This is where the game really shines for me, at least right now. The map selection isn't huge (I think around 8-10 maps or so), but there are a few elements that make this really fun to play for me:

1. It has a progression / customization system, to make you always interested in opening reward crates with the cash you earn from missions, and make your soldier that much better.

2. The enemies sometimes can swarm at you a bit, and sitting in one spot to fight them all isn't always practical vs just being mobile. So you get more of a feeling of urgency to make tactical decisions vs the singleplayer experience -- at least, sometimes.

3. You can play with friends, which, generally makes things more interesting when you're playing with intelligent partners. While there aren't a ton of people playing, the people that do play you can often keep in contact with and get games going regularly.

4. There is some degree of variation between mission runs. It's not a whole lot, but sometimes enemies will approach different directions in the same map, but on different runs. Sometimes there may be slightly different enemies (I've seen that too.) While I wish there was more of this, since this is somewhat minimal at the moment, it does help contribute to keeping things interesting.

I haven't played these yet, but I've heard they offer a much better experience compared to the main storyline. Will update my review with more information as I complete them.

Overall, I'm not going to say this is a great game -- but I think at the current, reduced price compared to launch it's definitely on par value wise with what you should expect to get out of it. If I had to quantify it, I'd give it a 6.5/10 on the grounds there is definitely room for improvement to both the general combat, and definitely the singleplayer. Still, I've gotten some great enjoyment out of this game that I think it's still a solid value where it is right now.

It's as if the developers visited a graveyard in the middle of the night with shovels, and started digging up a grave. Eventually they hit something hard, and it's a coffin from video games past. They pulled the coffin open, opening the lid with a slow creaking noise. Then they scream at it "RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!" like in beast master, and lightning strikes in the background while they scream it. Slowly a hand rises from it -- the hand of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.

That's what DOI is.

As someone who played both betas leading up to this point, I'd have to give this game about an 6/10. I've downgraded my score from 8/10 to 6/10.

Pros:

* By far, the biggest advantage of this game is how it does co-op so well. You don't have to fight for loot or XP. It rewards teamwork, since everyone gets XP for a kill their team makes. GREAT matchmaking and co-op. Really amazed on this one.
* The clothing options are fairly decent in amount -- far more than facial options.
* Hunting for gear, while grindy (the bad), can be fun when you're trying to build that perfect character.
* Compared to real life, their representation of Manhattan is not bad. It's about 80% accurate, with smaller non-landmark shops and buildings not being compeltely accurate. Still, pretty good.
* The gameplay and cover system is interesting to me, as a former Ghost Recon Online player. Feels very similar to that.
* PVP isn't overly punishing. Even if you die in a dark zone, you don't lose all your gear that you aquired ever-- just what you picked up in the PVP area. Totally well done (balanced) in this game, in my view.

Cons:

* Face customization is limited to about 8 faces per gender, or so. You can change basic things like eye color, and hair color, and some random tattoos or scars -- but not the facial elements themselves.
* The game can get a little grindy, similar to borderlands.
* The story is a little on the boring side at times, and the enemies seem repetitive although slightly different in weapons sometimes or visuals depending on where you are.
* Bugs are piling up like crazy, and there are a lot of people currently exploiting bugs in the game to gain insane amounts of gear that would be unavailable to legitimate players.

In conclusion, if you ever wished you could combine the combat system of Ghost Recon Online with the gun loot system and ARPG style of borderlands for stats, then this is for you. (And if not, that's ok too).

Still, what kills this game is the fact that Ubi just can't seem to patch the bugs they're creating fast enough, resulting in a lot of exploits being farmed and legit players being pushed out of places like the dark zone due to their lack of wanting to exploit. While I'll probably play the game periodically, I'm going to have to say "no" to recommending this game in the current state, but encourage people to check on the bug fix progress. If fixed, it can be a great game.

So, I loaded into the game, and I don't see any sort of metagame or any sort of progression system to be able to call this an "MMO" type of game -- which is what they list in the genre information. This is nothing more than a proof of concept helicopter game with three maps.

Furthermore, it's not like you can select "any" helicopter to take on a given map. It's JUST a multiplayer game with maps that have fixed aircraft you can take. In it's current state, it's just a generic helicopter shooter with the ability to capture points on a map.

Lastly, there isn't really much customization to the helicopters either. You get two, toggleable, loadouts per helcicopter. That's pretty much the limit of customization from what I could tell.

Overall, can't really recommend this game at his point. Put in a refund request for now. Hopefully it improves with time.

EDIT: In response to the developer... sure, I'll give it a shot down the road. It's just not the type of game I was hoping it would be at this moment.

Game immediately hangs within 60 seconds of me opening it. This is the only game exibiting such behavior for me, so it's not a hardware / setup issue on my end.

I'd recommending waiting till this game is out of "launch testing" mode, and the devs actually fix the launch day issues with it.

Update: still unable to play this game, close to two weeks later. Can't even open it :/

Having beat this game, and completed almost all of the side quests, here is my take on it:

TL;DR 7/10 -- not to much is new here. It has as some good points, but you should wait for a price drop to $30 before buying.

The story: It's pretty thin. If you're expecting a good story that you'll care much about, it's probably best to look elsewhere. I found the lack of capitalization on a good coherent story really lacking. Game seemed to end fairly quick and felt kinda linear, but with a lot of quests that were random. By the end of the game, I just wanted to beat it to get it over with. Not many surprises. (4/10)

Gameplay flow: This game doesn't really do anything new. You go to places, kill people, and take their scrap to upgrade you car. That's pretty much the entire gameplay, in a nutshell. You may have to steal a specific car or something and drive it back, but nothing that doesn't feel like a standard sandbox setup you'd find in Arkham City or other similar sandboxy type games. Lot of driving to random places, but luckily they have a mecahnism to quick travel over larger distances that would be a pain. (6.5/10 -- could've been more creative)

The hand-to-hand combat: It's pretty much the same as Arkham City, but even mashier. Pretty satisfying, although repetitive. The bosses, with maybe one exception, are identical and pretty much just reskins of the same model. Same attacks, same strategy throughout the whole game for all hand-to-hand combat bosses. Otherwise, there is a little bit of varyation between ground enemies that aren't bosses (they can be holding weapons, or a shiv) but are pretty much all generic thugs similar to Arkham City. (6.5/10)

The vehicle-to-vehicle combat: This is probably what makes this game shine, but it only goes so far. You have a decent variety of ways to dispatch your enemies when it comes to vehicles. Do you want to rip off their tires with a harpoon gun and them ram them to death? How about exploding their gas tank with your shotgun? Perhaps pull up next to them and use your flamethrowers to light them on fire, or use wheel spikes to grind them down physically? Early on these can be some of the most challenging combat types you come across -- at least, until you upgrade your war rig (car) more as the game progresses. Definitely fun. Feels almost like open world burnout with guns and explosives added to the mix. (8/10)

Visuals: The game looks pretty, but you can tell it's a little dated. I don't mind though. The game performs well (see below) and the render distance is impressive as you stare off into the endless distance. Not the latest generation, but definitely well done. (7.5/10)

Game Performance: Playing this game on a GTX 780 with an i7-4770k, this game runs like butter on high. In 67 hours of gameplay, it crashed once -- and I couldn't replicate the crash. Oddly well polished for a recently launched port. (10/10)

Highlights (Good): Storms. I feel they really did a good job on sandstorms, and encourage you to risk driving through them to pick up large boxes of loot that you'll find blowing around in the storms. It's INTENSE. Nothing light engaging in veihcle combat in the middle of a sandstorm, while lighting strikes all around you. Definitely something I look forward to whenever they happen. Feels like you're in the movie almost when one comes.

Highlights (Bad): Some missions require it be night to complete, yet there is no way to fast foward the two hour full day cycle. So you may have to just do side quests for a full hour to just to complete a given mission when it is night. Definitely not cool there is no option to just wait for nightfall.

Replay value: I could go back and do some of the optional quests, but I don't really feel motivated to at all. Not much more to do after the game is over. (3/10)

Overall: 7/10 -- Had some good fun, but got bored towards the end-game and just wanted to get it over with.